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In their exploration of CD-ROM histories, the CD-Hist project team interviewed , one of the first users of CD-ROM drives in Europe, the head of The Voyager’s , as well as both a practitioner and a theorist ��in digital media. The interviews, conducted on July 29 and August 22, led Alina Volynskaya to investigate deeper in how Apple’s application played a crucial role in the development of early CD-ROM projects.

HyperCard allowed users to create “stacks of cards”, each containing different types of media—text, images, sound, buttons, and menus. Users could navigate between different media and follow their own paths of exploration.��For instance, the well-known , one of the first interactive CDs released by the Voyager Company in 1989, allowed users to freely navigate between different sections of the symphony and switch between the music and the accompanying commentary.

Often described as a “hypermedia construction kit,” HyperCard was one of the earliest technological implementations of the visions surrounding interactivity and hypermedia. However, a single application was not enough to make interactivity a widespread practice; a substantial storage solution was also required—something that computers of the time could not provide.��This is where CD-ROMs came in, offering 650 MB of storage at a time when most computers had hard drives of only 40 MB or less. The combination of HyperCard and CD-ROM technology afforded the creation of some of the earliest“interactive” and “multimedia” digital artifacts, which have now become classics, including�� (1993), the Voyager’s interactive projects,��CD-ROM (1988), and early multimedia encyclopedias. Revisiting these classic CD-ROMs and examining the technologies that made them possible offers new ways to think about histories of interactivity and histories of computing at large.

Further reading on HyperCard:

• “”��– The Digital Antiquarian blog
• “”��– Blog post by Steve Moliva
• video on HyperCard (1987)
• (1991)

HyperCard in the Internet Archive:

• ��(1988)

^{Image source: Internet Archive}